- First name: Glenn 
  
- Last name: Ehrlich 
  
- Email address: REMOVED
  
- Home page: http://cooking-with-lisp.blogspot.com/ 
  
- Phone number(s): (602) 690-0309 
  
- Postal code: 85042-5514 
  
- City: Phoenix, AZ 
  
- Country: USA 
  
- Organization(s) you work for or study at 
  (please supply the name and city for each organization): 
  
Spectrum Astro, Gilbert, AZ, USA 
(An aerospace company that builds satellites - I'm a simulation 
software engineer, building distributed simulations to study future satellite constellations). 
  
- Fields of interest 
  (e.g. computer linguistics, numerical analysis, business software, 
  medicine, bioinformatics): 
  
Anything concerning Lisp. 
Smalltalk, particularly Squeak and Visual Works. 
Artificial intelligence. 
Space exploitation & exploration. 
Simulations. 
Large random swaths of computer science. 
  
- Have you written any Lisp-related papers? If so, please supply 
  bibliographical references (and URL's, if possible). 
  
No. 
  
- Have you developed or participated in the development of any 
  Lisp-related programs or libraries? If so, please supply a URL, 
  if possible. 
  
No, not yet.  I'd like to, though. 
  
- Lisp variants you have used (e.g. Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan): 
  
Common Lisp, Scheme, pre-Common Lisp 
  
- Lisp variants you're currently using or intend to use in the 
  near future: 
  
Common Lisp. 
  
- Lisp implementations you have used 
  (e.g. CMUCL, Lispworks, Allegro Common Lisp): 
  
SBCL, CMUCL. 
Emacs Lisp. 
Symbolics Genera (I recently purchased a Symbolics XL1200). 
LispWorks, Allegro Common Lisp. 
A little bit of CLISP. 
Pre-Common Lisp variants (the old Franz Lisp, MacLisp, some funky Lisp 1.5 variants) 
  
- Lisp implementations you're currently using or intend to use 
  in the near future: 
  
In order of usage: 
SBCL & CMUCL (my main implementations). 
Emacs Lisp (I always seem to be mucking around under the covers in 
Emacs.  It's my main tool for interfacing with Linux and Lisp, so I
spend a lot of time enhancing it for my needs). 
Symbolics Genera. 
LispWorks (a little bit) 
  
- Computer platforms on which you're using or deploying Lisp: 
  
Linux (most of my Lisp work winds up being here). 
Emacs (yes, I think of it as a platform) 
Symbolics 
MS Windows (a little bit) 
  
- Number of years of experience with Lisp: 
  
26 years: 
  
First exposure to it: 1978 or so, constant learning & playing since then. 
Hardcore, daily use: since end of 2003. 
  
- Do you use Lisp: 
  - at work (if so, how much) 
  
A little bit, not as much as I would like to, though.  At work, I 
use Common Lisp to prototype stuff that I eventually develop in C++ or
Perl.  I'm slowing building up an advocacy campaign to support Common Lisp,
but I need to do some more work first (see hobby section). 
  
  - for study (if so, how much) 
  
I use Common Lisp 100% for any research I'm doing (which is 
currently anything involving simulations). 
  
  - as a hobby (if so, how much) 
  
I use Common Lisp 100% if I do any programming at home.  I do a 
lot at home, maybe 10-20 hours per week, divided between my 
Symbolics and SBCL/CMUCL on Linux.  The biggest thing I'm working on 
is developing a distributed simulation framework in Common Lisp.  We 
have one at work (for simulating large satellite constellations), but 
it's in C++ and I'd like to show folks at work how much better 
something like that is in Common Lisp than in C++.  It's more of a 
research project than "hobby" work, because I'm trying to come up 
(or incorporate) better ways of supporting modeling and simulation, 
especially when distributed, all with using the powerful abstraction 
capabilities available in Common Lisp.  Hence, lots of research into 
what the simulation and modeling community has already tried, finding 
any existing simulation frameworks in Common Lisp, and so on. 
  
- Are you using Lisp as much as you would like to? 
  If not, why not? 
  
I'd like to use it at work more, but I'm actually getting in 
enough at home to satisfy me. 
  
- Do you see any obstacles to further Lisp growth (if so, what 
  is the biggest obstacle in your opinion)? 
  
Yes, I think the lack of a single, well supported implementation 
similar to Perl's or Python's is a stumbling block for new investigators
of the language.  Note that as has been discussed many times on c.l.l,
lack of a single implementation is not a hindrance to the established 
community, as the different implementations are free to meet different 
needs. 

The other big stumbling block for growth isn't lack of libraries, or 
a decent development environment, but the fact that the primary source
of documentation for us, the ANSI Common Lisp Standard, can not be freely
distributed.  This means that a new user must find out where to 
download it from (for some reason, newbies rarely seem to find 
Xanalys' Common Lisp HyperSpec on their own).  This means that you can't
have a single downloadable bundle having a complete development environment
including documentation (in the open source world, that is). 
  
I would like the ALU to help find a way to free up the ANSI 
standard so that it can be included as a standard component of an
implementation.  I'm not suggesting getting Xanalys to free up 
their own Common Lisp HyperSpec, as they have no particular incentive 
to do that.  Once we have the freedom to distribute the spec itself,
there are existing tools, like dpans2texi that can produce info format
and html formatted versions of the spec. 
  
- Would you be interested in a Lisp-related job or contract work? 
  
Not especially.  The domain is more important to me than the 
implementation language, and I definitely want to stay in the space
domain where I'm at. 
  
- Is your organization interested in hiring Lisp programmers? 
  
No. 
  
- Are you currently participating in Lisp-related meetings? 
  If so, where and how often? 
  If not, would you be interested in such meetings? 
  
No, if there was Phoenix, AZ, USA based Lisp/Scheme User's Group, 
I'd definitely attend.  Maybe I should try and start one up.